Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Tim Weiner's THE MISSION: THE CIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Tim Weiner is an author.  This is from WIKIPEDIA:

He was a Washington correspondent[3] for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1982 to 1992,[4] for The New York Times from 1993 to 2009 as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan and as a national security correspondent in Washington, DC.[5]

Weiner won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting as an investigative reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, for his articles on the black budget spending[6] at the Pentagon and the CIA.[1] His book Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget is based on that newspaper series.

He won the National Book Award in Nonfiction for his 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.[2][7]

In 2012, Weiner published Enemies: A History of the FBI, which traces the history of the FBI's secret intelligence operations from the bureau's creation in the early 20th century through its ongoing role in the war on terrorism.

His latest book, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945–2020, was published in 2020. Among other things it describes how the CIA helped Joseph Mobutu as a reliable anti-communist in Congo, or how Ronald Reagan's encounter with Pope John Paul II led to a covert program to support the Polish Solidarity movement. Timothy Naftali cautions that Weiner may be overstating Putin's influence on the 2016 Presidential elections: "The Trump phenomenon, which the Russians abetted but did not create, emerged from a broken nation."[8] This is also the assessment of Rajan Menon who, in his review for The New York Times, furthermore contends that he found no evidence supporting Weiner's suggestion that NATO expansion toward the Russian border in the 1990s sprang from the mind of Anthony Lake.[9]


That is incorrect.  This week, his most recent book was released -- THE MISSION: THE CIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY.  

Monday, Rachel Maddow spoke with Tim about the book.




So the book sounds really interesting.  But if you need more, THE GUARDIAN reviews the book and notes:

Following two impeachments (and two acquittals), an insurrection and another election, Trump is back in the White House and bent on revenge. “Donald Trump hates the CIA,” Weiner said, noting that Trump considers the agency the beating heart of a “deep state” that he believes is working to undermine him. Consequently, the president has appointed “a coterie of dangerously incompetent and servile acolytes to the highest positions of national security”. Weiner describes the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe – a former personal injury attorney, Maga congressman and, briefly, director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term – as “a spineless person who will do whatever Trump tells him to do”.

Shortly after we spoke, Ratcliffe ordered a review that criticized the CIA’s original report on Russia’s pro-Trump influence operation, and the former CIA director John Brennan became the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI.

The new director has also moved aggressively to implement a purge at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters. “He’s attempting to rid the CIA of its most experienced officers,” Weiner said, “and to impose ideological purity tests. Ratcliffe said explicitly from the get-go that he aimed to align the leadership of the CIA with the president’s view of the world. Since the president’s view of the world is largely based on falsehoods and imaginary enemies, I think this will be an extremely difficult task.”
Meanwhile, Ratcliffe dismissed hundreds of recently hired staffers and then sent their names to Elon Musk in an unclassified email that Weiner said was probably intercepted by the Russians and Chinese, who he posits are now presumably working to recruit them as spies. “All they need to do is to find people who are either deeply resentful or who might have a financial or a drug problem to be exploited.”

Trump’s anti-diversity crusade will also have national security repercussions, Weiner predicted. In February, a judge allowed the administration to reassign the team responsible for diversifying the agency. “For decades, the CIA has tried to hire people who don’t look like they just got off the bus from Kansas on the very sound principle that if you want to spy in a nation like Somalia or Pakistan or China, it might be wise to have a workforce that is not made up exclusively of white guys, and who speak languages other than English,” Weiner said. “Diversity was one of the CIA’s few superpowers, and the mindless abolition of the effort to diversify the CIA’s officers and analysts was one of the most stupid self-inflicted wounds that Ratcliffe could have delivered.”

Meanwhile, as Politico recently reported, allies may now be reluctant to share sensitive information with the US, no doubt mindful of the 2017 incident in which the president gleefully handed the Russian foreign minister a highly classified Israeli tip. “The CIA, to an extent that people rarely understand or appreciate, is really dependent on allied intelligence services,” Weiner explained. The appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, who oversees the CIA and 17 other intelligence agencies, only compounds the risk, Weiner said. Gabbard has never worked in the intelligence community and has been accused of parroting Russian propaganda. “What ally would share secrets with a dangerously deluded person like that?”

Weiner recognizes it might come as a surprise to some to hear him extolling the virtues of the agency he has previously skewered. “I’m not known as a great defender of the CIA but neither am I a defender of willful ignorance,” he said of the Trump administration’s seeming unconcern about the threats posed by foreign adversaries. “I do think that the mission of intelligence to divine the secrets of the enemies in the United States is worthwhile. There’s unfortunately no mechanism for defining the intentions of the president, and therein lies a danger.

“What keeps me up at night,” he continued, “is the fact that Trump has put the instruments of American national security in the hands of crackpots and fools, and that their incompetence and ideological blinkers will blind them to a coming attack. If the United States gets hit again under Trump, he will destroy what is left of our democracy.” When I asked Weiner how he thought the CIA might respond to Trump’s provocations, he chuckled. “Is the CIA going to join the resistance? No,” he said flatly.


Jeff Rowe (AP) reviews the book as well and notes:


Half of the book details how the CIA swerved far out of its intelligence-gathering lane after the 9/11 attacks and morphed into a paramilitary organization, calling its torture tactics “enhanced interrogation techniques” and killing many thought to be terrorists absent the oversight that governs the military services.

For example, one agent let a prisoner freeze to death in a dungeon-like “fetid hellhole” at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

In the agent’s defense, the post 9/11 months and years were a time of pervasive fear of another attack and relentless pressure on the CIA to prevent that. Some notable successes followed; agents penetrated both the Kremlin and Saddam Hussein’s government.

Knowledge is the essential tool of national security and peace and “The Mission” makes it clear we let the CIA go off track at our peril.

“A new cold war is slowly escalating toward existential danger,” the author writes. “Only good intelligence can prevent a surprise attack, a fatal miscalculation, a futile war.”


Here he is on MSNBC today discussing the book with Katy Tur.



And, yesterday, he was on NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED:


MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Gone are the days when a fake passport and a cover story are all a spy needs to get by. So what's an ambitious intelligence officer to do in this era of cameras everywhere, of retina scanners, of AI? Well, Tim Weiner takes on the question of how the CIA is trying to reimagine the art of espionage in his new book. It's titled "The Mission: The CIA In The 21st Century." Tim Weiner, hey there.

TIM WEINER: Hello, Mary Louise.

KELLY: How much harder is it these days for a spy to spy?

WEINER: It's a challenge unlike any in the history of espionage, which goes back to when Sun Tzu wrote "The Art Of War" 26 centuries ago.

KELLY: Yeah.

WEINER: And Sun Tzu said, know your enemy. Well, the problem is your enemy knows you. An example of the challenges facing the CIA - 12 years ago, Chinese spies and hackers broke into the Federal Office of Personnel Management and stole passport files, fingerprint files, security clearance forms of 22 million people who work for the federal government, including people who work for the CIA. They crunch this data with retinal scans that they stole from international airports. And if you are a CIA officer arriving undercover in Dar es Salaam or Beijing or any other of a number of foreign capitals, you are likely as not to be confronted by a Chinese officer saying, hey, Joe. I know who you are.

KELLY: We know exactly who you are. Yeah. I mean, I suppose the flip side is that the U.S. can do the same thing. It's harder for America's rivals and adversaries, harder for a Chinese spy to land in, say, New York or Minneapolis and not be immediately spotted and tracked.

WEINER: Yeah, the problem there is that the Chinese Ministry of State Security is about 20 times bigger than the CIA. And the Chinese have ambitions to project their surveillance state into the United States. I mean, the difference between the Russian and the Chinese services is that the Chinese want to know us, and the Russians just want to screw us.

KELLY: Is it mutual?

WEINER: Well, screw thy enemy is definitely part of the equation here (laughter). Ever since the CIA was founded in 1947, it has tried to oppose, blunt, undermine, subvert Russian imperialism in the world. That took kind of a back seat after the end of the Cold War. CIA directors and their immediate underlings told the CIA's officers to be nice to the Russians, to, like, work with them on fields of mutual interest, like counterterrorism. And one senior CIA officer told me that this was like a guy who goes out and buys a baboon, and the baboon rips his face off, and then he goes out and buys another baboon. The Russians were not interested in cooperation. They shook your hand with one hand and picked your pocket with the next.

KELLY: So let me bring us to this moment. We are in 2025, and the CIA again serves a commander-in-chief, a president, who has openly questioned the agency's leaders and their work. When you ask current CIA officers about that, what do you hear?

WEINER: The gut-wrenching, nauseating feeling that the president of the United States has gone over to the other side and joined the axis of authoritarianism. It's hard for an outsider to understand the feeling that went through the high levels of the CIA when Trump ordered the United States to vote with Russia, North Korea and Iran at the United Nations against a resolution condemning the Russian occupation of Ukraine.

KELLY: Did CIA staffers raise that specifically with you, that incident?

WEINER: Oh, yeah.

KELLY: What were they saying?

WEINER: You know, there's an ideological purge that Trump has ordered at CIA. And the current director, John Ratcliffe, who is a MAGA acolyte, has told top officers and analysts with 20 or 30 years' experience to head for the exits, find a new line of work. He dismissed two years' worth of new hires, everybody the CIA had hired in 2023 and '24. And ideology is the enemy of intelligence.

So, again, new book released this week. 


"The Snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Wednesday, July 16, 2025.  Inflation increases under Chump, the effects of the tariffs begin to be felt, ICE agents need to hide behind masks while ICE attorneys hide their names from the courthouse records, Mark Cuban wants Democrats to co-sign on Chump's gestapo immigration war, and much more.


Jeff Cox (CNBC) reports, "Consumer prices rose in June as President Donald Trump’s tariffs began to slowly work their way through the U.S. economy.  The consumer price index, a broad-based measure of goods and services costs, increased 0.3% on the month, putting the 12-month inflation rate at 2.7%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. The numbers were right in line with the Dow Jones consensus."  Shane Croucher (NEWSWEEK) adds:

But there are signs that prices are due to rise further in the coming months.

Some companies have said they have or plan to raise prices as a result of the tariffs, including Walmart, the world's largest retailer.

Automaker Mitsubishi announced in June that it would be increasing prices by an average of 2.1 percent in response to the duties, and Nike stated that it would implement "surgical" price hikes to offset tariff costs.

But many companies have been able to postpone or avoid price increases, after building up their stockpiles of goods this spring to get ahead of the duties.

Other companies may have refrained from lifting prices while they wait to see whether the U.S. is able to reach trade deals with other countries that lower the duties.


Inflation was addressed at the top of THE 11TH HOUR WITH STEPHANIE RUHLE last night on MSNBC.



Chump campaigned on ending inflation on day one.  As Stephanie noted, Tuesday was day 177 of the Chump administration.  No, that's not day one.


Inflation continues to increase.


Question: Do you think he might have done a better job if he and his administration had focused on the economy instead of trying to micro manage college universities -- not really a presidential duty -- or a hundred and one of his other pet causes?  


If he'd focused on the actual job, would the economy be as bad as it is?  Because it is bad and its going to get worse.  Each month it already has.  Walmart, for example?  Keesha e-mailed to note that the plain label canned chick noodle soup?  Great Value is the brand.  It's not at 70 cents a can and, under Joe, it was 50 cents a can.  Last month, Keesha notes, she paid 70 cents an avocado and this week the price jumped to 90 cents.  


And as if inflation isn't bad enough for the average American, Chump's 'big' 'beatiful' bill is about to really steal from the middle class, the working class and the poor to give huge tax breaks to te extremely wealthy.

Stephanie noted and quoted the banking institution's reaction to the inflation increase:


Bank of America: Today's report provides ample evidence that tariffs are being passed onto consumers.


Wells Fargo: One of the top questions we get these days involves when will we see the impact of tariffs on consumer spending and in the retail sector.  The time is now.


Ben covers the economy this morning on MEIDASTOUCH NEWS.


Ben notes, "But the only prices that are going down?  Airfare, hotel and motel prices.  These are recession indicators, folks."  


Chump's tariffs are destroying the economy and so is his war on immigration.  Martín Macías, Jr. (LOS ANGELES PUBLIC PRESS) reports:


Over the last month, Jorge, an Inglewood resident and a cook at a restaurant, has scanned social media each morning to check for ICE activity near his home or along the route to work. If federal immigration agents are around, he stays inside, which he said means risking the loss of a job that sustains his family of four.

“I leave home not knowing whether [ICE agents] will arrest me or not,” said Jorge, whose last name LA Public Press has agreed to withhold to protect his identity as an undocumented person. “I don’t go to work when I hear that [ICE is] near my home.”

Jorge, who said he’s lived in the United States for 24 years and is married to a U.S. citizen, said he’s missed at least eight days of work in recent weeks due to the fear of arrest by ICE. 

“I can’t miss many more days of work,” Jorge said. “Money isn’t going as far as it once did.” 

Though ICE hasn’t targeted his workplace, Jorge said he’s distributed red cards explaining the legal rights of immigrants to his coworkers so they’re more prepared in case agents show up.

Jorge’s story reflects a broader crisis across Los Angeles County’s restaurant industry, where some establishments have seen revenue drop by as much as 25% since immigration raids began in June, according to industry leaders, forcing owners to cut staff and reduce hours.

Since June 6, undocumented restaurant workers like Jorge have been targeted for arrest by federal immigration agents across Los Angeles County, where one in three residents is an immigrant. About 1.8 million California residents work in restaurants and food service, making it the largest private employer in the state, according to the National Restaurant Association. Nationwide in 2025, at least 20% of restaurant workers are immigrants. 

Across Southern California over the last month, at least 1,600 immigrants have been arrested by ICE in raids at sites including factories, car washes and Home Depot parking lots. The operations have made immigrants fearful of leaving home for daily errands and forced businesses such as auto shops to close, costing thousands of dollars in lost wages and revenue.

An ICE spokesperson didn’t respond by time of publication to a request for comment on the impact that federal immigration operations are having on restaurants. 

The restaurants where immigrants work and eat have also reported that they’re struggling to remain open as ICE operations continue to sweep across the region. 

Tricia La Belle, president of the Greater LA Hospitality Association and a restaurant owner for more than 30 years, told the LA Public Press that her five establishments have seen a 25% drop in revenue since ICE launched raids in June. 

The loss of business has forced her to cut staff, she said.

“We’ve cut down to the bare bones,” La Belle said about her establishments, which include Boardner’s nightclub in Hollywood and the Bon Vivant restaurant in Atwater Village. “You can’t provide the same quality of service when you don’t have a bus boy, barbacks and floor maintenance crews. You just don’t have those bells and whistles anymore.”




You wouldn’t know it from what FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, is about to do, but it has a human rights policy.

“Guided by its human rights approach, FIFA embeds its commitment throughout the organisation and engages in an ongoing due diligence process to identify, address, evaluate and communicate the risks of involvement with adverse human rights impacts. … FIFA will constructively engage with relevant authorities and other stakeholders and make every effort to uphold its international human rights responsibilities.”

But here was Sunday’s final of the Club World Cup — a sort-of dry run over the past four weeks for its 2026 World Cup in North America scheduled to be anchored in the United States — with FIFA boss Gianni Infantino and champion Chelsea in celebratory embrace with President Donald Trump, who is defining his second term in the White House not by protecting human rights but by trampling them.

Indeed, a day before the final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, several lawmakers toured a hastily built detention center in the Florida Everglades for undocumented migrants and described it in inhumane terms. Trump officials and supporters jovially named the encampment “Alligator Alcatraz” after the vicious reptiles that live in the surrounding swamp and the notorious prison of last resort in the San Francisco Bay that was shuttered because the government deemed it too expensive to keep humane.

On Friday, a federal judge in California ordered a stop to Trump administration raids of everything from farms to public parks to car washes looking for undocumented laborers. The actions erupted into violent confrontations between National Guard troops in riot armor and protesters trying to protect the immigrants being hunted.

Anecdotal narratives illustrate the enforcement of Trump’s immigration policies as xenophobic at best. People such as Kilmar Abrego García, the Salvadoran man living in Maryland on protected status whom the Trump administration admitted it mistakenly deported in a raft of detainees to a dissolute El Salvador prison. He’s still in custody. People such as University of Florida student Felipe Zapata Velásquez, a Colombian whom Gainesville police arrested on traffic offenses and then turned over to Trump immigration officers. He agreed to be deported rather than face detention.
Then there are those such as Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student on a student visa from Turkey, and Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown academic, whom Trump’s masked squads snatched off streets into unmarked vehicles and whisked away to who-knew-where because they were said to have voiced opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. Both eventually were released but not necessarily freed.

And there is an expanding list of countries from which Trump would like to ban citizens’ entry to the United States. They include mostly sub-Saharan African nations to go along with countries in Latin America, Central Asia and the Middle East. They include countries that certainly will qualify for the World Cup. Iran already has.

All of this is an affront to what FIFA claims it stands for. Human Rights Watch reminded FIFA of as much last month.


U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will now be the biggest federal law enforcement agency, by far. Its budget will exceed that of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and U.S. Marshals Service combined. (It even has a bigger budget than the militaries  of Brazil, Italy, and Israel.)

It will require a crash hiring spree for new ICE agents, with little training and oversight. Federal and local law enforcement officials will be pulled off their core duties in massive numbers to play the unfamiliar role of immigration enforcer. All this for an agency whose agents wear masks to avoid identification while grabbing people off the street, arresting political leaders, and choosing to sow terror.   

And for all the claims that only the “worst of the worst” will be targeted, enforcement seems increasingly to be focused more on construction workers and landscapers with no criminal history than on drug traffickers or sex offenders.

Then there is the troublesome role for private prisons. Many of the new facilities will be built and run by private firms. Eisen is the author of the definitive book, Inside Private Prisons. She reports, “In May, the CEO of private prison company CoreCivic told investors, ‘Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now.’ This budget bill will solidify that vision for CoreCivic, GEO Group, and other firms that manage and own immigrant detention centers and transportation subsidiaries.”

The administration has rebuffed oversight by Congress. Federal law says that members of Congress and their staffs must be permitted to “enter[], for the purpose of conducting oversight, any facility operated by or for the Department of Homeland Security used to detain or otherwise house aliens.” ICE is throwing up barriers and in some cases denying access outright. 

And of course, the Brennan Center has documented the ways this current crackdown is being pursued in violation of the law. The misuse of the Alien Enemies Act, a discredited wartime statute the administration has used to deport migrants, is a vivid example.


Let's stay with legal issues for a moment.  ICE agents?  As weve noted, if they don't quit their jobs their future is one of two paths: Suicide or drug addiction to self-medicate.  You can't do what they're doing and not tear apart your soul.  The same is true of the the attorneys working for ICE. 


Debbie Nathan (INTERCEPT) reports:


Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers. 

“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime. 

As ICE agents across the country wear masks to raid workplaces and detain immigrants, government attorneys need not cover their faces to shield their identities. Legal experts who spoke to The Intercept agreed the practice of concealing the lawyers’ identities was both novel and concerning.

“I’ve never heard of someone in open court not being identified,” said Elissa Steglich, a law professor and co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin. “Part of the court’s ethical obligation is transparency, including clear identification of the parties. Not identifying an attorney for the government means if there are unethical or professional concerns regarding [the Department of Homeland Security], the individual cannot be held accountable. And it makes the judge appear partial to the government.”


Why not identify themselves?  Because they're rightly ashamed of themselves.  And they can hide all they want from the public -- or try to -- but they can't escape the voice inside them that knows what they're doing is wrong, the voice that will nag them until the day that they die.  Too late, they'll grasp that there's not enough money in the world to justify selling your soul.

Some people really aren't qualified for politics.  Politics chases money, yes, but your ability to amass money does not mean you grasp politics.  More than anything, common sense is required for politics and our best politicians possess common sense.  Selling out is not common sense.

I'm not a Mark Cuban fan.  That's been obvious for years.  Mark always has an idea.  "Idea" may be giving him too much credit.  He always has a "notion."  But his notions are not based on common sense.  His notions are based on what the other side is saying.

We'll circle back around.  Let's move over to Paul Krugman who has common sense and a brain and uses both.  From his most recent SUBSTACK: 

And as G. Elliott Morris points out, the detailed polling suggests overwhelming disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies. Notably, voters are twice as likely to support giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship than they are to support deporting them. By the way, in 2023 Congress seemed likely to enact bipartisan legislation that would have opened such a path. But Trump killed it.

What’s going on? Why were cynical, seemingly savvy takes on the politics of immigration so wrong?

Part of the answer is that there is almost always a “thermostatic backlash” against the policies pursued by a party that has recently gained power. Pundits who imagined that Trump’s war on immigrants would become more, not less popular once it began were assuming that he could defy all historical precedent.

But, like Morris, I think there’s more going on here than just the thermostat.

First, it’s important to understand that the call for mass deportations and/or imprisonment was based on a lie — the claim that America is facing a huge immigrant crime wave. “They’re not a city of immigrants, they’re a city of criminals,” declared Kristi Noem about Los Angeles last month. Last week city officials reported that LA is on track to have the fewest homicides in 60 years.

It's true that many Americans have remained willing to believe that big cities like LA and NYC are scary urban hellscapes, even though they’re quite safe these days.

An aside: There was a period in the 1970s and 1980s when New York, in particular, actually was the kind of scary place people like Trump and Noem claim it still is. As it happens, that sort-of hellscape period coincided with an era when New York had fewer immigrants than at any time before or since:

In any case, however, it seems to me that the lie is beginning to unravel as it becomes clear that ICE is having a really hard time finding violent immigrants to arrest.

According to the Miami Herald, only around a third of the people being held in “Alligator Alcatraz” — a cute name, but it’s a concentration camp, pure and simple — have any kind of criminal conviction.

Why aren’t they rounding up more undocumented criminals? Because that would be hard work, and anyway there aren’t that many of them. Morris did a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggesting that there may in total be only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal records, and 14,000 convicted of violent crimes. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is demanding that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day. Do the math, and you see why they’re grabbing farm workers and chasing day laborers in Home Depot parking lots.

So Americans may be turning on Trump’s immigration policies in part because they’re starting to realize that they’ve been lied to. But an even more important factor may be that more native-born Americans are beginning to see what our immigrants are really like, rather than thinking of them as scary figures lurking in the shadows.

It’s a familiar point that views of immigration tend to be most negative in places with very few immigrants and most positive in places where there are already many foreign-born residents. You can get fancy about why that’s true, but I would simply say that if you live in a place like New York, where you’re constantly interacting with immigrants, they start to seem like … people.

And the Trumpies — for whom, as Adam Serwer famously observed, the cruelty is the point — are inadvertently humanizing immigrants for Americans who don’t have that kind of daily experience. The nightmarish ordeal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has probably done more to highlight the humanity of immigrants, documented or not, than any number of charts and tables. And while some Americans are instinctively cruel, most are, I believe, instinctively decent.


Get it?  The crime wave myth needs to be called out.  Common sense and a brain puts Paul miles ahead of Mark Cuban.  Mark's gotten  Eric Swalwell on his side.  With what?  Mark's notion.  The way to take on Chump is to accept his premise (cave) and start making lists of violent criminals and we'll all round them up together.


What are we, Lindsey Buckingham?


If we go, go insane
We can all go together
In this wild, wanton world
We can all break down forever


Mark Cuban throws in the towel.  He calls that politics.  

If we've learned anything in these most recent days of The Epstein Files, it's that MAGA lies.  And then lies again.

What kind of an idiot -- Mark Cuban, for one -- buys the lie and makes plans to meet in 'the middle.'  It's not the middle.  The lie has pulled the country over to the right and Mark Cuban is going to push us further over.


I'm getting really tired of the Mark Cuban fan boys.  If you're not paying attention, he's also pimping Alien Musk's notion of a new political party.  

I don't see why elected Democrats feel they owe Mark Cuban anything. 

Take what's being called the biggest sweep or raid, the one targeting the cannabis farm in California.  Julie Watson, Amy Taxin and Olga R. Rodriguez (AP) note, "The government said four of the 361 arrested had prior criminal records, including convictions for rape and kidnapping."  The government says they nabbed 361 people.  And the government says four "had prior criminal records."  The government said.  Even their own figures don't back up a crime wave.   That's 1.1080% of the number taken in.  


And I look at the concentration camp in Florida -- call it whatever you want -- and I'm thinking, "If this were the McCarthy era would Mark Cuban be coming forward to say: Hey, let's meet them half way.  Some of these artists are Communists so let's make a list and . . ."  At what point do we take a stand for what we believe in and say, "No, we're not going to make this easy for you."  Because what Mark Cuban's proposing and what Eric has signed off on is making it easier and is getting in bed with the devil.  That's because every generation has a Mark Cuban or two who doesn't have a spine and is more inclined to go along to get along.  


Across the country, people are standing up and saying "no."  At USA TODAY, Rev. Tanya Lopez writes:

As a pastor, I consider the church not just a place of worship, but a sacred home − somewhere families gather to find comfort, courage and communion. For generations, our pews have held the laughter of children, the tears of grief and joy, and the prayers of the faithful.

Last month, the sanctity of our space was shattered.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered the parking lot of Downey Memorial Christian Church to take a man who was walking through our property. The agents were armed, masked and aggressive.

They tried to intimidate clergy and staff − people whose only armor is their faith and moral convictions. In that moment, our sacred space became a site of state-sanctioned fear and violence.
This is not isolated. It is part of a widening campaign.
Archbishop Alberto Rojas of San Bernardino, the spiritual shepherd of more than a million Catholics, recently excused parishioners from their obligation to attend Mass.

Why? Because fear of ICE raids has become so pervasive that even worship cannot feel safe.


 
Standing in front of the Detroit headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a sunny Monday morning, the Rev. David Buersmeyer asked a security officer if he could accept a letter from Catholics asking ICE Detroit to better treat immigrants.

Judith Brooks, a fellow Catholic who advocates for immigrants, stood by the Detroit priest's side with a sealed envelope, leaning forward to hand the letter to him. But the officer didn't respond, slammed the glass door shut with a loud thud and then pushed on it to make sure it was secure.

"Shame!" a protester shouted out. A crowd of hundreds who stood outside the building on Michigan Avenue then started to sing a song by Batya Levine, a Jewish musician: "In hope, in prayer, we find ourselves here, in hope, in prayer, we're right here."

The scene on July 14th outside the Detroit ICE building illustrated the growing frustration Catholic leaders and others have expressed with immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump, which they allege has unfairly targeted communities with overzealous actions.

[. . .]

"We are here today to ask that our nation and its leaders" listen to the plight of immigrants, Sister Rebecca Vonderhaar of Immaculate Heart of Mary told the large crowd at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church before the march.

"Many of our brothers and sisters and their families have proven their innate goodness," Vonderhaar said. "They have been so unjustly treated by raids and mass deportations. Let us know that apathy is never an option, but trust with faith, goodwill and a bit of advocacy will bear fruit. And trusting in your goodness oh, God, we move on."

 To defend immigrants and fight back against Chump's gestapo tactics, people are being thoughtful (well, people other than Mark Cuban) and creative.  Jennifer Stavros (LOS ANGLES PUBLIC PRESS) explains:


Federal immigration raids sweeping Los Angeles have created such widespread fear that even naturalized citizens are afraid to leave their homes, prompting mental health providers to form informal support networks for traumatized immigrant communities.

Immigrant neighborhoods that were once bustling have become noticeably quieter, with fewer people on the streets and some businesses seeing reduced foot traffic.

Therapists working in these communities say clients are canceling appointments and expressing new fears about seeking help.

Sandra Espinoza is a second-generation, bilingual Mexican-American licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and associate professor at Alliant International University’s Los Angeles campus. She has been paying attention to what has been happening locally and said she felt called to action.
“Once I heard about the ICE raids happening, I was very upset, and [I wanted] to find a way to kind of channel my anxiety and anger. I remembered that during the wildfires, another therapist had organized a list of over 800 therapists who were willing to provide pro bono services,” Espinoza said. “[I thought] how cool would it be if we could do this for the undocumented community at this time?”

While Espinoza’s network is smaller than the 1,000-provider wildfire list, she is far from alone in her desire to help migrants across the county. Some care providers are offering support publicly, while others, fearful due to their own or their clients’ immigration connections, are choosing to offer it privately through whisper networks and word-of-mouth referrals.

Therapists have voiced concerns about making these lists publicly accessible for confidentiality and safety reasons, so accessibility is limited and relies primarily on referrals and vetting processes.
For Espinoza’s network, both therapists and clients complete Google forms for vetting. The list is password-protected with only three people having access. Most connections are made personally by Espinoza, with 95% of clients choosing telehealth sessions.


The Coalition to Stop Avelo is another example of fighting back. The Houston, Texas based airline entered into a contract with Homeland Security to deport immigrants to other countries (not necessarily their own country) and the coalition came together to protest and raise awareness that if you're flying Avelo, you're flying with the gestapo.  The Coalition's Matthew Boulay explains that Avelo "got themselves into financial trouble and took the ICE contract out of desperation.  It was a morally bankrupt deal with the devil -- and now it’s backfiring, because passengers don’t want to fly Avelo."

Information is key.  Fiona Murphy (NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER) notes how NYC's faith-based food banks and shelters are preparing:

Immigration enforcement agents do not legally need a judicial warrant, issued by a court, to make an arrest in a public space. If they have reason to believe someone is in the country unlawfully, they can detain the person on the street. However, entering private areas like offices, kitchens or the grounds of a mosque or church requires a signed judicial warrant. Still, immigration advocates warn that many agents present administrative warrants from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security instead, which do not authorize entry. 

That distinction has shaped recent training sessions at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Manhattan, the largest soup kitchen currently operating from the grounds of an Episcopal church in the city.

"We certainly have done some internal preparations just so that our staff knows what to do in the event that [immigration agents] show up," said Elizabeth Starling, Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen director of development. "We went through a training about the need for them to have a specific judicial warrant because, well, you're not coming on our property for a fishing mission — that's not going to happen." 


People are fighting back.  MOTHER JONES' Isabela Diaz reports:

Marcelo Gomes da Silva is still trying to get back to his old life. The 18-year-old, who was born in Brazil, wants to enjoy the summer before his senior year at Milford High School in Massachusetts—go to pool parties, hang out with friends. Since his arrest by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he has been praised for his strength. “But that’s not really what I want,” he told Mother Jones on a video call. “I want everyone to think of me as Marcelo Gomes da Silva, just as I was before.”

On a Saturday morning in late May, ICE arrested Gomes da Silva on his way to volleyball practice. At first, when he noticed a white Ford Explorer trailing his car, he thought little of it. But when Gomes da Silva pulled into a friend’s driveway, an ICE agent walked up, knocked on the window, asked for his documents, and eventually handcuffed him. The officer asked Gomes da Silva if he knew the reason for his arrest. He said he did not. “Because you’re illegal,” the agent told him, “you’re an immigrant.”

Gomes da Silva had never thought of himself as undocumented. He came to the United States at age 7 as a visitor and later obtained a now-lapsed student visa. “I was just in shock,” he said. “I didn’t know what was going on and I was kind of questioning God…Why is this happening to me? Did I do something? I never really understood why I was there.”

The Department of Homeland Security said ICE officers “never intended to apprehend” Gomes da Silva but were instead looking for his father, the owner of the car, whom they accused of having a “habit of reckless driving.” To the US government, Gomes da Silva was an accidental target in the wrong place at the wrong time. These so-called “collateral arrests”—often warrantless apprehensions of immigrants without a criminal history—have become more commonplace as the Trump administration pushes the legal limits of its deportation dragnet.

“I didn’t say he was dangerous,” acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said of Gomes da Silva at a press conference days after his detention. “I said he’s in the country illegally and we’re not going to walk away from anybody.” Gomes da Silva was taken to ICE’s Boston field office in Burlington, where he was detained for six days until a judge released him on bond in early June.

Fortunately, the young man's community said "Hell no" and got to work:

After practice, school administrators gathered everyone in the locker room and shared the news. There was a deep silence. Some players cried. One of them threw up. “I knew it was happening in Milford, but I didn’t really know anybody who was detained,” said Greco’s son Colin. “That’s when emotion just hit everybody and we were like, ‘This is real.’”

The Archbishop of Miami, Father Thomas Wenski, issued a lengthy statement which included:


It is alarming to see enforcement tactics that treat all irregular immigrants as dangerous criminals. Masked, heavily armed agents who do not identify themselves during enforcement activities are surprising - so is the apparent lack of due process in deportation proceedings in recent months.

Along these lines, much of the current rhetoric is obviously intentionally provocative. It is unbecoming of public officials and corrosive of the common good to speak of the deterrence value of “alligators and pythons” at the Collier-Dade facility. Common decency requires that we remember the individuals being detained are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters of distressed relatives. We wish to ensure that chaplains and pastoral ministers can serve those in custody, to their benefit and that of the staff. We also raise concerns about the isolation of the detention facility, which is far from medical care centers, and the precariousness of the temporary “tent” structures in the Florida heat and summer thunderstorms, not to mention the challenge of safely protecting detainees in the event of a hurricane. 

We call on all people of goodwill to pray for our government officials, for those in immigration custody and their families, for those who work in enforcement, and for justice for all in this nation, whose prosperity immigrants have always contributed to. 


Mark Cuban wants us to 'meet in the middle' on this hideous program.  He wants Democrats to co-sign off on it, thereby giving Republicans cover and the ability to claim both parties supported this evil plan. No.  This needs to be fought and people across America grasp and see what Mark Cuban can't or won't.


Let's wind down with this from Senator Patty Murray's office:


ICYMI from June: Senator Murray Statement on Protests in Response to Immigration Arrests in Spokane

Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, released the following statement on the news, reported by the Spokesman-Review, that federal agents arrested and searched the homes of Spokane residents who took part in a protests in Spokane on June 11th. The protests in June were sparked by the sudden detention of two asylum-seekers whose work visas were abruptly revoked days before.

“The Trump administration is abusing the force of the law to intimidate Americans exercising their First Amendment rights—whether you are a Democrat or Republican, this is wrong and we all need to speak out against this disturbing perversion of justice.

“If you are as angry as I am about Trump’s unconstitutional and cruel assault on immigrants, we need to speak out peacefully against inhumane policies. We lose our democracy when our voices fall silent.

“Let’s be perfectly clear about Trump’s unconstitutional immigration crackdown: he is diverting limited federal resources away from pursuing violent criminals to instead round up individuals with no criminal record—and now, apparently, he’s going after peaceful protestors as well. We cannot be silent and I will be contacting DOJ directly regarding this gross abuse of federal resources.”

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 Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Pam Tries Another Lie" went up yesterday.   The following sites updated:



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